First Steps with Facebook for Business

Over the years, Facebook has developed from being a photo-sharing, gossip-guzzling app mostly used by teenagers into a professional platform for business owners to share and exchange information.

The first steps involved in getting your business onto Facebook involve setting up your page or pages, which is a fairly straight-forward process and can be done in less than half an hour. You will need to choose whether you want your page to be a local business or place (this is a great option if you want people to be able to ‘check in’), a company, organisation, or a brand or product.

Then give your page a name, try to include any key search phrases associated with your business in this name, you can then add a description of your business, again try to include your key search phrases in this description. If you have a website then add a link to your website or a relevant page on your website and choose your Facebook web address.

It’s then time to start personalising your page, don’t let Facebook upload a profile image from your website, it will not do your brand image any justice whatsoever. It is much better to spend time creating a specific profile picture which could just simply be your logo re-sized to 180px x 180px - this is the optimal size for profile images.

Spend some time creating a professional cover image, this can include some text and you may want to include phone numbers or email addresses for people to contact you easily. If you are not able to do this yourself then you may wish to hire the services of a graphic designer.

If you want someone else to be able to help you manage your page then you can add a new administrator or manager by editing your page settings.

Next, you need to start building a marketing plan for your page, let’s start with who are your target audience and what are they looking for.

Do a search on Facebook for other similar pages to yours and take a look at the content they are posting but don’t just copy them. Great content for Facebook pages includes images, questions, and links to factual information. Start gathering your content and making your scheduled posts, the optimal time to post on Facebook is usually between 2pm and 5pm. If you have all of your content ready then you can schedule your posts for a future date or time using the clock icon in the status box.

Once you have been posting content regularly for a couple of weeks then its time to start generating some likes for your page, you may have randomly picked some up already but now its time to actively market your page.

First of all, invite all of your friends to like your page and then promote your page with a likes campaign. Be careful with your targeting though, use the settings to ensure that you get likes from people who will interact with your page and your product - inactive likes are as much use as a chocolate teapot. With reach targeting you are able to choose the location, interests, age and gender of your audience. Then you need to set a daily budget and how long you want to run the campaign for. This can either be 10 days, two weeks, 30 days or you can customise the schedule to suit yourself.

Additional ways to encourage people to engage with your page include adding an address so that people can check in, this is most widely used for restaurants or bars but technically you can check in anywhere. The first time that someone checks into your business, it probably won’t show in the ‘places near here’ results and will need to be searched for. So, once you have setup your address, make sure that you check in a few times to get the ball rolling.

Facebook tabs can be customised to include anything from a contact form to a ‘mini website’, but I would point out that it isn’t necessary to include them and pages which have added a contact form rarely receive any enquiries through it. On Facebook, people understand how to use the messaging feature and tend to stick to this method.

If you really want to take your Facebook marketing to the next level, then create an additional page for your brand. This is where the really social part of Facebook comes into play, for example if you are a company selling bathroom fittings it’s quite difficult to get people to engage with your page as bathroom fittings aren’t the most exciting subject in the world. However, if you create an additional page and start sharing content such as: images of funny bathroom designs, cartoons about how to stop people hogging the bathroom etc then this page is likely to get a lot of engagement and help to promote your brand.

PPCnSEO is an international digital marketing company based in Pattaya with clients across the globe, whose expertise include web design, search engine optimisation and social media marketing.
If you feel that your business would benefit from an improved online presence and marketing approach, please contact us and we can discuss your goals and the best approach for your business.
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